Distributing a Sphere game
Made a game? Want to release it and make other people enjoy your game? There's several ways to do it!
Contents
Packaging your game
Just release it as-is
This one is easy, but people who don't have Sphere would need to get Sphere in order to play your game.
- Browse to your game directory (in sphere/games/MyGameName).
- Zip/archive your game's folder.
- Release the zip on Spherical.
People who have Sphere can just copy the game into their games/ folder and open it with the startup game, or they can open the game.sgm straight with the engine/editor.
Include Sphere with your game
Note: these are instructions for including the Windows version of Sphere. Instructions might also be slightly messy.
- Make a copy of the Sphere folder, but exclude the games and startup folders.
- In the copied version, create empty directories for startup and games.
- Put your game in the startup folder without the game folder name (so like Sphere_copy/startup/game.sgm and NOT Sphere_copy/startup/MyGameProject/game.sgm)
- OPTIONAL: delete editor.exe if you don't want non-Sphere users to be able to open the project (or if you want to remove an element of confusion).
- OPTIONAL: rename engine.exe to something appropriate. Like your game's name.
- OPTIONAL: run config.exe and change the settings to how you want to release the game (for example, 2x zoomed with OpenGL renderer).
- Zip up the game and upload/distribute it! :)
Release it as an SPK game package
An SPK is a packaged version of a Sphere game, in an alternative format that's a bit more tricky to extract the game out of. It allows you to distribute the game as a single file, though it's not used often as current Sphere has some issues dealing with SPK files.
<Instructions coming soon>
Uploading your game
- If the game is small (< 128 KB), you can upload it straight on the forums.
- You can also upload your game on the Spherical Downloads Drive.
